Signal To Noise

Another Day in the Wasteland

My name was Tech. Or at least I was pretty sure it was. It was written on the front of my journal so it must have been my name. The cover was cracked and charred and the first hundred pages had been torn out. It was battered and beaten, but it was the only thing in the world that was mine aside from the clothes on my back. It lived in a pocket on my coat. And the journal always came back when I tore it apart, or threw it in a pond, or set it on fire.

The journal was part of me, and I was part of it.

It reminded me of my name, it reminded me that I had come here from a world outside of this one, it reminded me that I was here to study the Hum. It was a six by nine inch lifeline that kept me tethered to whatever scraps of me I had left to hold on to. I don’t think I could live without it, and the journal was quick to punish me whenever I tried.

We were twelve when all of this started. Then there was the argument at our first camp where everyone decided to burn their gear and go home. That took five of us, and the journal decided to spare me. It woke up in my coat pocket, scarred from the flames and still warm, but alive and willing to work with me again. Next was our disastrous trip across the lake where … something had frightened me in the water. I threw the book at it. The thing ate another three. The book forgave me again. After I tore it in two and got Meds killed, I got the message. Stop hurting the journal and it would stop hurting us. It would leave us alone to finish the Expedition.

Not that it really mattered anymore. You couldn't call us a proper Expedition anymore. Not now. There were only three of us left, and none of us could remember why we decided to come here, or what any of this was for.

When we agreed to the Expedition, They had warned us we might lose parts of ourselves. But They hadn't warned us we would lose our names, or where we were from, or what the point of all of this was.

Or who They were. 

I barely remembered Them now. There were only flashes left. Army trucks and armed guards. Men in suits and women with buzz cuts and machine guns. A few blocks of ghost town severed from the rest of the world and a white wall of static that made your head ache and your nose bleed if you looked at it too long.

The Wall ringed the place They called the Central Exclusion Zone, and it was not friendly to people. See, we were supposed to be thirteen when we started, but someone had been impatient, tried to rush through and there was a snap. A hiss. Blood pattering down around us like a crimson spring rain, and number thirteen was gone. They kept a close eye on us after that. Blindfolds. Canvas hoods. A constant buddy with mirrored sunglasses who wouldn't even let you take a shit by yourself. Our friends made sure we got through the wall. How we'd made it through was a mystery and how we'd make it back was an even bigger one.

Hopefully the Hum held our answers. It had to. The Hum was an ever expanding soundwave being broadcast from somewhere in the center of the Zone. It looked like a waterfall if you graphed it out. The journal told me it was pink noise, but I don’t remember writing that. I do remember writing the Hum moved, and that whenever we traced it to its source it led us to nothing, and that it was about to move again.

I snapped the journal shut and slipped out of the threadbare tent I had called home for the last three weeks. Our latest camp was perched on the edge of a large crater that was half full of muddy water and home to a network of creeping vines the colour of jaundiced flesh with wide, yellow leaves. They were spongy, technically edible, even though they tasted like boiled shit, and they were the reason we had stayed alive this long.

The tent next to mine opened up and Crypto stepped out into the haze. “Good morning,” she said.

“Is it?” I asked. The Zone was always blanketed in a thick layer of clouds and filled with a subtle half light. It was always light enough to see, no matter what time it was and we’d given up on keeping track of hours and days a long time ago.

Crypto shrugged. She was tall with narrow shoulders and often kept her pale blue eyes trained on the ground, avoiding eye contact.

“I guess, it’s hard to say,” she said. “The hum hasn’t moved yet, has it? I was hoping to check on that spider nest before we moved on.”

I reached into an inner pocket of my jacket and pulled out a fan of square, reinforced antenna. The splayed crest of black polymer clipped into an expansion port behind my left ear and sent a tingling wave of static rolling down my spine. I had data ports behind both ears, and a larger card slot spliced into the base of my skull. Both arms were made of pale, cream coloured ceramic and strung with orange synthetic muscle. They held an entire array of soldering tools and precision screwdrivers and knew their own way around any computer system we happened across. Looking down at my augmented hands always made me smile, filled me with a small burst of euphoria that this was who I was always meant to be, but at the same time, I couldn’t shake the sneaking dread that naturals like Crypto would hate me for it.

She never said anything, of course. There was a good reason that Crypto, Curi and myself were the only ones left alive. We were probably the only three members of the expedition capable of working together without killing each other.

But still. Something deep at the back of my mind warned that I should be careful. That Crypto might not be as friendly as she looks to people like me.

I flipped open a small display built into my forearm and shook my head. “The signal looks like it’s building to jump.” It was scaling up, drawing more power from wherever in hell it powered itself. “But we’ve got a few hours until it gets there. We can go poke your spiders first.”

Crypto poked her head into the third tent in our meager camp and called out for Curi.
She didn’t answer.

“Did you hear Curi come back last night?”

I shrugged and tapped my temple. “Active filtering, remember? I was zoned in on the signal. A bomb could have gone off here last night and I wouldn’t have heard it.”

“Shit,” said Crypto. “The gun is gone too.”

I swallowed hard and a hard knot of dread balled up in my stomach. There were a lot of things that could happen out here by accident.

And a lot worse things that could happen on purpose.

I dialed up my scanners and slipped a transmitter array into the expansion port on the other side of my head. Lenses slid up over my eyes from hidden slots on my cheek bones and an augmented reality grid drew itself over the ground in front of me.

“Tracks there,” I said pointing to a dry patch of cracked earth that had been worn through a channel of knee high grass. The Zone was full of winding game trails like this, and we never had figured out what kind of animal made them. I would never have noticed the tracks with my own eyes, but the AR system locked onto them in under a second and started calculating speed and direction along with a best guess of when Curi had left.

“This way,” I said. “Come on.”

I set out at a brisk walk, letting the AR system guide me to our friend … or whatever was left of her.

“She’ll be okay, right?” asked Crypto.

“Sure.” I nodded. “Curi is tough. I’m sure she’s fine.”

A gunshot ripped through the air and I trained all of my gear onto the source of the noise, slowing to a stop while my sensors pinned down the location.

The gun fired again.

There was no time to wait for a data point. I broke into a dead sprint, pushed forward on a white hot wave of terror.

The gun fired again, and again.

And then fell silent, its last echoes fading into the subtle whisper of wind through the grass, the tiny shrieks of Crypto’s favourite spiders, and the driving pink noise of the Hum.